d English phrases at his
command would allow. Frowenfeld soon noticed that he never entered the
shop unless its proprietor was alone, never sat down, and always, with
the same perfection of dignity that characterized all his movements,
departed immediately upon the arrival of any third person. One day, when
the landlord was making one of these standing calls,--he always stood'
beside a high glass case, on the side of the shop opposite the
counter,--he noticed in Joseph's hand a sprig of basil, and spoke of it.

"You ligue?"

The tenant did not understand. "You--find--dad--nize?"

Frowenfeld replied that it had been left by the oversight of a customer,
and expressed a liking for its odor.

"I sand you," said the landlord,--a speech whose meaning Frowenfeld was
not sure of until the next morning, when a small, nearly naked black
boy, who could not speak a word of English, brought to the apothecary a
luxuriant bunch of this basil, growing in a rough box.

CHAPTER IX

ILLUSTRATING THE TRACTIVE POWER OF BASIL

On the twenty-fourth day of December, 1803, at two o'clock, P.M., the
thermometer standing at 79, hygrometer 17, barometer 29.880, sky partly
clouded, wind west, light, the apothecary of the rue Royale, now
something more than a month established in his calling, might have been
seen standing behind his counter and beginning to show embarrassment in
the presence of a lady, who, since she had got her prescription filled
and had paid for it, ought in the conventional course of things to have
hurried out, followed by the pathetically ugly black woman who tarried
at the door as her attendant; for to be in an apothecary's shop at all
was unconventional. She was heavily veiled; but the sparkle of her eyes,
which no multiplication of veils could quite extinguish, her symmetrical
and well-fitted figure, just escaping smallness, her grace of movement,
and a soft, joyous voice, had several days before led Frowenfeld to the
confident conclusion that she was young and beautiful.

For this was now the third time she had come to buy; and, though the
purchases were unaccountably trivial, the purchaser seemed not so. On
the two previous occasions she had been accompanied by a slender girl,
somewhat taller than she, veiled also, of graver movement, a bearing
that seemed to Joseph almost too regal, and a discernible unwillingness
to enter or tarry. There seemed a certain family resemblance between her
voice and that of t